8 June 2009: "“The Arm.”

This post is about infanticide. In order to make yet another incisive point about castration, Carles pretends to be threatened to the point of paranoia by what he calls "the arm" -- the tendency of women who have attained a level of repute or self-confidence in patriarchal society to carry their bag with an arm extended perpendicular to their bodies in simulation (or unconscious mockery, perhaps) of the erect phallus. Carles, playing the role of the displaced patriarch to the letter, reacts with sheer outrage, upping the rhetorical ante on his profanity to denounce women on numerous occasions as "‘lil cunts’" or "cunty", as "broads" or "bitches." He fulminates about the presumptuousness of women who "cock" their arm in this fashion, attributing it to their false sense of social significance or fame. The embittered chauvinist, as Carles suggests, will regard such women as failing to know their place, and will act to mete out retribution with verbal abuse.

And of course, this is followed by a reminder of what women's proper place is -- the domestic sphere: nurturing infants, carrying only those bags that facilitate child rearing. "Sorta just wish women would buy ergonomically designed purses. Feel like women need to make better decisions being able to carry a baby in one arm, and baby supplies in the other." Women wouldn't create so much trouble for themselves and the men who take dominating them for granted if only they became biological machines of babymaking: "I wish that women who were obsessed with ‘life being terminal’ would have a child, and shift their focus to ‘caring for a lil person who came out of their wombs.’ I think that is actually part of eVolution/the Circle of Life."

This, Carles demonstrates, is how female independence -- measured solely in terms of the discomfort men experience at their assertiveness -- is construed as a kind of female betrayal of the human species, a refusal to raise the next generation, a metaphoric murder of children unborn and uncared for.

Most insidiously, this oppression is all presented insidiously in our culture as a kind concern for women -- "Feel very worried about women, and the stress that they are putting on their bodies." And this token, backhanded concern is topped off with a wistful retreat from the dream of gender equity, refashioned as an impossible ideal: "Wish men and women were ‘truly equal.’"

What Carles would propose as a feminist counterattck on this front is hard to extrapolate, but one would assume he would support a more aggressive gesture than the potentially ambiguous phallic "Arm." Though he remarks that he "Feel[s] like women should try to be more like men," that seems to be in patriarchal character and not his true voice. Perhaps he means to advocate the opposite: Since any attempt to collapse femininity into masculinity is doomed to failure and apt to be experienced as a kind of reverse castration, women should adopt a more radically vaginal symbolic posture. This may be the meaning of Carles' concern for how full women's purses tend to be -- were they to be emptied, they would serve society as a more powerful symbol of the vaginal orifice not as an absence but a positive presence, even a fashion totem.